Ralph Hornblower III

                      Ralph (Ray) Hornblower, III   

A graduate of Harvard College, Ray Hornblower became at the time the third ranked rusher in Harvard football history, and led the Ivy League in rushing for most of his junior year. After working for the Governor of Massachusetts for a year, Ray attended the University of Virginia School of Law and received his Juris Doctor. He then joined the Civil Rights Division of the US Justice Department, where he filed and litigated major cases in Nebraska and Pennsylvania, extending the constitutional rights of the mentally handicapped in state mental institutions. He also conducted the first formal Justice Department review (in 1978) of the government’s 1963 investigation of the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, which claimed the lives of three school girls, and which later led to the convictions of three Klansmen in state court.

In addition to investigating headline names, Mr. Hornblower, as an attorney in the Department's Office of Professional Responsibility, examined misconduct in the ranks of the FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration, Border Patrol, Bureau of Prisons and U.S. Marshals Service. Hornblower and the entire office (OPR) developed credibility because of their willingness to tackle the misdeeds of top officials, and not just those of the less powerful. In 1978, the office investigated and published the Justice Department's first report on abuses by longtime FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and his inner circle.

Hornblower also represented the Department before the Senate and House Committees on Intelligence, while working for Deputy Attorney General Harold Tyler. Gen. Edward Levi. Levi established the Office of Professional Responsibility at the end of 1975 and picked Hornblower to be the Office’s third attorney. At the time, the office was the only agency in the executive branch that could start administrative and criminal internal investigations. It never had more than 35 lawyers, but it conducted thousands of examinations.

In 1998, Ray founded Hornblower & Company, a venture capital and consulting firm, whose origins date to his great-grandfather’s investment firm started in 1881 (formerly known as Hornblower & Weeks), providing consulting advice to medical technology, transportation/logistics, affordable housing, and alternative energy companies.    

Ray has also been a professional tenor soloist for over three decades, and is presently the cantor at St. John the Evangelist (Roman Catholic) in New York City.